“We want the initial response [to Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo] to be overwhelming so we never give an outbreak a chance to do what it did in West Africa. We want to throw everything at it in a reasonable way and a vaccine is part of that."

"The answer used to be education—the more educated you were on the issue the more likely you were to get vaccinated. The challenge is for scientists to be humble and acknowledge that in this day and age facts will not win the day."

"I’m tired of having people just talk about the problems, which is why we’ve tried to lay out answers in this book. Our key message is not to scare you out of your wits. It’s to scare you into your wits."

"I think one of the most highly successful organizational operations in the world today is IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We need an IPCC for antibiotic resistance as much as we need one for greenhouse gases."

"I am absolutely optimistic we can have a game-changing flu vaccine where [people receive] one shot every so many years. It could protect very well against the H1, H2, H3, H5, H7 and H9 viruses, which are the key ones we worry about for a new pandemic."

"We can be sitting on top of a potential catastrophic event — as we are right now in Brazil. We have the ability to make a very effective vaccine for yellow fever. The problem is no one wants to spend the money to make it because you can’t make money on it."

"The two threats that really pose the greatest challenge to the world today in terms of catastrophic outcome are pandemic influenza and antimicrobial resistance, both of which we’re doing very [little] about on a global basis."

"Today, an influenza pandemic could be more devastating than an atom bomb. We are already witnessing an outbreak of influenza in birds — the H7N9 strain, in China — that could be the source for the next human pandemic."

"With each passing year, we lose a percentage of our antibiotic firepower. In a very real sense, we confront the possibility of revisiting the Dark Age where many infections we now consider routine could cause severe illness."

"Last year we spent over a billion dollars researching new HIV vaccines … an important investment. But the best estimate we can come up with is we only spent about $35 million globally on … research on new game-changing flu vaccines."